Welcome to Part Three of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is publish fresh content on a consistent basis to bring more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase of the automation process. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured in order to begin attracting new traffic automatically when you post web content to your WordPress site.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as their greatest challenge online. Also, the business landscape is becoming so much more competitive and businesses are researching any advantage they can that can help you get better results online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over other competitors. For businesses, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start from the moment their website is launched.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by an expert website builder but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s one way to understand the key difference:
With a WordPress website that has been expertly configured you get a professional web presence plus an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured website gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does it take more work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, but also a special type of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with an anecdote.
A Semi-True Story …
All was running smoothly in the gizmo manufacturing plant when production suddenly ground to a halt.
No one could figure out what happened and so the manager decided to call in an expert.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and immediately headed to the main control box. After staring at the electronic components for 5 minutes or less, the expert then took out a tiny hammer and made a gentle tap near the left side of the control unit.
Immediately, every machine started working as before.
The manager was overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the manager received a service bill for $5,000.
The factory manager dialled the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay so much for less than five minutes work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived and was placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The main challenge most businesses face online is driving traffic to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the factory floor had the expertise to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to be compensated fairly for spending years acquiring the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to immediately assess and avert a serious crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a site configured so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social sites and dozens of other traffic-generating web properties would be instantly notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While the solution to many problems may seem quite easy in hindsight, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few basic settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things like:
- Which plugins you need to install for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve desired outcomes
- Which options you need to configure in order to ensure that things will function to plan, etc.
(Generating web traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this stage of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem technically challenging, it can be quite involved. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring a solution, configuring some options and settings in your dashboard area … it’s all of this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website involves the integration of many components such as your web hosting server, your website or blog, and various third-party sites and services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some WordPress settings)
If we were to create a simple flowchart showing the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing all the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these steps in more detail.
Web Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for website installation purposes. We’re talking about fine-tuning settings in your web server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your website may attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This stage of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for good and bad traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like configuring server-level spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring your domain and email forwarding, etc …
(Have you configured your control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various third-party sites.
External Services
The concept behind choosing external sites is that all content will get posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other components of your web traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
Once you add these external platforms to your traffic network, content pointing back to your site gets automatically fed to your search, social and aggregator accounts. Your content and site benefits from exposure online, helping your business tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites will need to be set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings to help speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Webmasters
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides you with a range of essential information, SEO tools and diagnostic reports about your website.
Once your Google Search Console account has been set up, you can use the account information with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing efforts, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, tracking information can be easily integrated with WordPress via any of several Google Analytics plugins and and sent to many other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Data And Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account, this information can be used to integrate and automate web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress offers website owners a self-hosted (WordPress.org) and a hosted (WordPress.com) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you are planning to build a professional business presence online.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate these features into your automated traffic system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need your various social accounts set up before you can integrate these with your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have accounts set up with all the main social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just select those that will work well with your system and/or content syndication tools (we cover some of these tools in more detail in the Automation phase).
(You can post your content to many social bookmarking sites. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are many different platforms that can be added to your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these, or to discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your site’s settings.
WordPress Traffic Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that its global settings have been set up correctly.
Let’s go over some key areas.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, your WordPress admin area includes a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and frequently overlooked automated traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings Screen)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services box
By default, when WordPress is installed, this section includes only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can have an influence web traffic. For example, your choice to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could affect someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your website or blog to get the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
The most important setting here as far as traffic is concerned is whether the Search Engine Visibility check box is enabled or not.
Typically, you want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically notify all the update services you have specified in the Update Services section when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion Settings
Although discussion settings are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your content, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks enable WordPress to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the ways your permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring SEO-friendly URLs)
We have created a detailed tutorial about using permalinks here: How To Configure WordPress Permalinks
Configuring Settings – WP Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add just about every kind of functionality imaginable to your website, including plugins that add traffic generation capabilities.
Let’s take a brief look at some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, you cannot afford to ignore the importance of website security.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to botnets and hackers.
For more information, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web pages more search engine friendly …
(WP SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. When properly configured, this plugin not only makes your site easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content online can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your site using free or inexpensive plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing to their website with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins.
Many social sharing plugins let you select which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social sharing plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which users can unlock by linking or tweeting your page.
WordPress Traffic Generation Theme Settings – Configuration
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your traffic.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, some themes also include built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your content is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes include built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
Configuring Additional WordPress Sections
Last (but by no means least) in the WordPress traffic configuration process, are the components that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business as more and more people begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, you need to ensure that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding legal pages to WordPress, see this article:
Post Categories And Tags
Post categories & post tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s SEO.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your site’s categories and tags earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the categories and tags that have been set up.
Add A Site Map
A visitor site map that displays all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external applications discover more of your online content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although Google can index your site just using an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
Don’t Forget Your Site’s 404 Page
When visitors searching for your website type in the wrong URL or click on a dead hyperlink, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(A 404 Not Found page)
A 404 page can be turned into a useful source of traffic to your functional web pages …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to recover traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found page can be set up on your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to attract more traffic is publish new content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of a number of different elements and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section 3
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of articles aimed at helping you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically using a WordPress website or blog and proven online marketing methods.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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